ELZUBI to Al-Ghad: Lack of Financing and Governance Keeps Local Cooperatives Trapped in a Vicious Cycle
Food security expert Dr. Fadel ELZUBI explained that Jordan imports the bulk of its needs in grains, oils, and sugar, leaving its dining table hostage to prices and supply chains beyond its control. The twin shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine exposed the fragility of this model. This is precisely where cooperatives play a structural role: they strengthen local production by pooling small farmers into entities capable of securing inputs, standardizing practices, and ensuring steady supply.
ELZUBI added that the cooperative’s primary function is to inject resilience into the food system. Diversifying sources of local production and spreading them geographically reduces the impact of any single shock and grants the state a margin of maneuver in crises that concentrated import chains cannot provide. Food security, therefore, is not measured by stockpiles alone but by the system’s ability to withstand and recover—an attribute generated by cooperatives.
He noted that Jordan faces high unemployment rates, concentrated among youth and women, fueling migration from rural areas to cities and draining the periphery of its productive energies. The cooperative, as a locally rooted institution, creates decent jobs where people live rather than where cities are congested. In doing so, it tackles three problems at once: unemployment, poverty, and demographic imbalance between center and periphery. International experience confirms that women’s cooperatives, in particular, have a multiplier effect, as rural women reinvest their income in education, food, and family health at higher rates, turning economic returns into compounded developmental gains.
ELZUBI stressed that the individual farmer in Jordan is a weak link in the value chain: buying inputs at retail and highest prices, selling produce to middlemen at lowest prices, and bearing market risks alone. Cooperatives reverse this equation through four integrated mechanisms: lowering production costs via collective purchasing, improving bargaining power with traders and exporters, collective marketing that ensures volume and quality to access markets, and food processing that retains added value locally instead of exporting raw. For example, the difference between selling olives and selling bottled, graded olive oil is the difference between subsistence and a value-added economy.
He further highlighted Jordan’s acute water scarcity—among the lowest globally—with per capita renewable water below 100 cubic meters annually, less than one-fifth of the international absolute scarcity threshold. Agriculture consumes the largest share of these resources. Collective water management through cooperatives thus becomes a necessity, not a choice. Cooperatives provide the optimal framework for adopting climate-smart agriculture, modern irrigation, and water harvesting, distributing the high cost of technology across members who could not afford it individually. In this way, the productivity of each drop of water—not merely each dunum—should become the guiding metric of agricultural policy. Cooperatives are the institutional vessel best suited to achieve this at scale.
He pointed out that a significant portion of agricultural output in the Arab region is lost between field and table, largely due to weak post-harvest infrastructure: storage, cooling, sorting, and transport. By virtue of their aggregated size, cooperatives can invest in shared infrastructure that individual farmers cannot finance. Reducing losses is not just about efficiency; in a resource-poor country, it is equivalent to producing more without additional water or land—arguably the cheapest and most sustainable form of agricultural expansion.
ELZUBI emphasized that Jordan faces three intersecting pressures: worsening drought, volatile global food prices, and disrupted supply chains. The common denominator in confronting them is community resilience, which cooperatives naturally generate through risk-sharing, pooled savings, and local safety nets that absorb shocks before they become livelihood crises. A community organized cooperatively adapts better than a fragmented one, simply because it has an institution to plan, negotiate, and invest on behalf of its members.
He noted that the cooperative model is no longer theoretical. In India, the dairy cooperative “Amul,” owned by millions of farmers, is among the world’s largest food brands. In East Africa, cooperatives marketing coffee and tea secure decisive shares of national exports. In Europe, agricultural cooperatives dominate market shares, especially in the Netherlands, Denmark, and France, underpinning some of the world’s most successful food companies.
ELZUBI explained that the common thread in these cases is that cooperatives provide small farmers with what small farms lack: scale, financing, technology, and market access—elements often missing in Jordanian agriculture. The deeper lesson is that these successes are not spontaneous; they rest on supportive legislation, financing tailored to cooperative structures, and professional management separating ownership from operations. Replicating the model in Jordan is possible, but only if the same institutional conditions are built—not by merely multiplying associations.
He candidly assessed the Jordanian picture as unsatisfactory: the cooperative sector includes around 1,500 associations and over 134,000 members, yet nearly a third are practically inactive. The sector is constrained by intertwined structural barriers: weak financing, absence of lending tools designed for cooperatives, limited governance and professional management (leaving many associations captive to individuals or families), weak marketing and disconnection from modern value chains, limited innovation and digital transformation, and fragmentation and small size that deprive them of economies of scale—the very rationale for their existence. Paradoxically, these constraints feed into one another: small size prevents financing, lack of financing blocks professionalism, weak professionalism keeps size small—a vicious cycle unbroken by piecemeal interventions.
ELZUBI concluded: the remedy must be systemic, not fragmented, and rests on several tracks—updating cooperative legislation to match today’s economy and facilitate mergers into viable entities; creating specialized financing funds with tools tailored to agricultural cycles and collective ownership rather than commercial lending templates; supporting digital transformation in management, marketing, and product traceability. He also called for building managerial capacity through professional executive management separating ownership from administration; linking cooperatives to value chains, food processing, and export; encouraging women’s and youth cooperatives as the highest developmental return; and forging tripartite partnerships among government, private sector, and international institutions such as FAO, IFAD, the World Bank, and ILO to transfer expertise, financing, and markets simultaneously.
